Saturday, 16 August 2014

Part II: More steps towards going paperless - Using Fronter

Part II: Some highlights from the previous school year

I mentioned
Fronter in my previous posting. It is the platform our school uses. In fact, as
far as I know, it is the platform all schools in Helsinki use. So there :) I have
a course room for each course that I am teaching. (yes, the courses are called rooms and school subjects are called
corridors). Fronter has many handy tools,
especially the test tools are being developed all the time, and the students
enjoy practising some key elements with them. I also like the conversation
forums and the possibility to embed videos. The tool for shared documents is
also handy (until some student accidentally deletes the document, this happened
luckily only once last year).

Last term I
wanted to see what would happen if the students took the course exam on Fronter.
That was a pretty exciting experience. This was the first time ever I conducted
an online course exam, so in the beginning I was full of questions. However, it
all turned out to be fine. I allowed my students to use all online dictionaries
and help they could possibly get. Some of them found this confusing: “Really? Are you sure?” “Yes, I am sure :)” The actual planning and creating
the exam took some time, but it was well worth it. The test tools automatically
corrected the structured vocabulary and reading comprehension tests and I was
left with evaluating the essays, which I like doing anyway.

I know
there are many teachers in Finland who use online testing regularly. I wish I’ll
have time to learn more from their experiences in the coming school year.
Whichever platform we are using for creating online exams, it would be so great
to join our forces and share the tests.

One more note about our persistent friend Fronter. I have also taught many online and distance learning courses using the platform. If you want to see one example in more detail, click here to see what I wrote about it last December.

This is how the home page of my online English introductory course looks like.